Word: piston
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Perky young U. S. composers often try to cut their teeth on symphonies, try writing musical epics before they have learned how to spell cat, musically speaking. An exception is Boston's softspoken, dark-eyed Walter Piston, who last week conducted the premiere of his First Symphony with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Like Composers Brahms and Bruckner, Composer Piston had bided his time until he was well into his forties...
Programmed by canny Conductor Koussevitzky between the First Symphony of Beethoven and the First Symphony of Sibelius, Composer Piston's magnum opus drew as many bravos as if it were the real meat in the sandwich. Though part of this enthusiasm may have come from a desire to see local Harvard Professor Piston make good, solemn critics were agreed that his symphony was one of the most individual and stirring works of its kind by a U. S. composer. Praised were its skillful instrumentation and the rugged climax of its final movement. Noted also was an emotional juiciness hitherto...
...past, 44-year-old Composer Piston's dry, academic, cacophonous works have drawn hosannas from modernist theoreticians rather than from music-hungry audiences. But even conservatives have admitted that he seemed to know what he was doing, and seemed to be doing it with relentless determination...
Determination played a big part in landing quiet-voiced Professor Piston where he is today. At 26, a married man with very little in the way of a formal education, he managed to get enrolled at Harvard, worked his way through, graduated summa cum laude with a Phi Beta Kappa key on his watch chain. A winner of the John Knowles Paine Fellowship, he was sent to Paris for two years to study with famed Pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (TIME...
Paced by six Dartmouth runners, with handicaps ranging from five to 600 yards, Cunningham ran his race almost exactly as he planned: the quarter mile in 58.5 sec., the half mile in 2:02.5, the three-quarter mile in 3:04.2 and-pumping his piston-like legs as fast as he could-the mile...